Saturday, October 4, 2008

CALDWELL - Federal agents arrested more than a dozen undocumented immigrants during an operation Wednesday evening in Caldwell.

Fourteen illegal aliens were arrested at two separate Caldwell residences and booked into the Canyon County Jail on immigration holds.

According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice, 13 of those arrested are from Mexico; one is from Guatemala.

Ten individuals agreed to accept a deportation order and waived their right to a hearing. They will be returned to Mexico. The remaining four individuals have been placed in immigration proceedings. An immigration judge will determine if they will be ordered removed from the country or allowed to stay.

The immigrants were taken into custody by a Boise-based Immigration and Customs Enforcement fugitive operations team. ICE has 95 such teams deployed across the U.S. assigned to locate, arrest and remove individuals who have been ordered deported by immigration judges but have failed to leave the country.

"As a result of the efforts of the Fugitive Operations Teams, the nation's fugitive alien population continues to decline," Kice said. Estimates now place the number of immigration fugitives in the U.S. at slightly under 560,000, a decrease of more than 34,000 since October 2007.